18 Feb
2022
18 Feb
'22
1:02 p.m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MasPar says that MasPar
was founded by ex-DEC chip VP Jeff Kalb. He took a design done at DEC, for a massively
parallel machine inspired by the Goodyear MPP with some changes. DEC decided not to build
that so MasPar did and DEC then resold it. The description sounds vaguely familiar. The
manual I downloaded says it has 1024 cores per board, and up to 16 boards. Neat.
If you have a university library nearby go check the old Computer
Society archives. I was involved with the Supercomputing conferences in
the early 90's (and built the E-commerce system for SC94's registration)
and talk of this system has knocked loose a marble in my brain from the
late 80's. There might be more documentation in the various proceedings
or in the Computer magazines and Transactions on Parallel Computing from
the time....